1. Field of the Disclosure
The present application relates to application metadata and, more particularly, to harvesting application metadata for advertising.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, a web application creator who wants to monetize metadata generated by the application through advertising may attempt to negotiate with advertisers directly or leverage a service that will crawl a site associated with the application and automatically select ads for placement there. Direct negotiation with advertisers is generally outside the core expertise of many web application developers. Existing third party services, on the other hand, are myopic in their approach to ad placements. For example, ads placed with a web application are determined more or less solely based on the metadata generated by that web application. When a web application delivers a piece of metadata that may be valuable in combination with other information, including, for example, metadata generated by other web applications, traditional services may not adequately value the metadata or the application that generates it. This inefficient services ecosystem may result in a situation where some web applications, although undervalued, are maintained as “labors of love” by their creators. Ultimately, however, this development paradigm will result in lower quality and less diverse applications.